———–

Eleven

The next night Clyde and Warren came for me. During the day I noticed the guards all carried guns, Abby told me they always had but I knew different. At least I thought I knew different. I had no proof, except what my memories told me.

“Guys, I’d rather not go… I don’t feel too good.” I gave them both a fake smile, a nervous one that I tried to put an element of queasy into. A weak gambit, a simple ploy but it had a chance, I thought. I thought a lot of things that were proven wrong it seemed.

“John, don’t make this hard for us,” Warren said as one of his hands drifted toward his belt and the thick wooden stick that hung there. Clyde’s hand drifted towards his gun. He was gonna shoot me? Was that even possible?

“I don’t want to make it hard on you, but really I just don’t feel…” A soft snap cut me off. Clyde’s thumb unsnapped his holster and his eyes drilled into mine. I shrugged. “Let’s go,” I said glumly. When there was no choice, there was no choice.

As we walked through the building I saw other guards, more than we ever had around, wandering and giving the residents grim looks. I saw one of the residents go down in a quick flurry of sticks, beaten to the floor for some transgression or another, I couldn’t tell what they had done to deserve it where I was. The only sounds from the altercation that reached me were a few screams and some wet, meaty thuds. We kept walking.

The examination room was dim, only every other light functioned, and chilly. Vandrell stood near the doorway and nodded at the guards as they brought me in. They both turned to go and I considered Vandrell carefully.

“Look, Doctor Vandrell, I think these treatments are bad for me.” The facility hadn’t done me wrong, but then again, in the facility I remembered none of this would have happened. It was time to stop taking things for granted. It was time. What time was it, exactly? I spun around looking for a clock but there was none. I did, however, notice the chair. It looked like an old electric chair and not like any good examination device I had ever seen. The skull cap was there, the wooden frame slightly charred from use. I felt sick just looking at it.

“John, get in the chair. We have to continue, don’t you see?” I didn’t see. Not one bit did I see. In the realm of seeing why, I was the blind.

“No.” I tried to put some force into the word, to hide my fear. Vandrell, for his part, stabbed me in the arm with something, taking advantage of my glances at the chair.

“No isn’t a word we like here at McGee’s, John. You know that,” he said as I grabbed at my arm, blackness swirling up to drag me under. Damn it. What time was it?

*****

I woke up, I came to, whatever term is right for it, in a hallway. Then I got up and started looking for her. The gore disturbed me, it made me feel cold and harder than I wanted to admit to myself.

I worked my way down the stairs to the basement and my sense of self seemed to expand with every step. It wasn’t a sense of answers being below, it was just time, time was my answer for this. Snatches of memory flooded my brain when I would let them, I just had to stop trying and let them. The problem, I found, was that I couldn’t let them. I had to keep moving and keep trying to find her.

The basement door was pristine. There was no blood, no bodies and the door was firmly locked. I shook the doorknob a few times anyway, just to be sure, and then put my ear to it to listen. The metal surface was surprisingly cool against my skin, making me shiver. I blamed the shiver on the metal, wanting it to be that and not fear. It was a dead end, but I tried banging on the door anyway. The metal was too thick to be heard through and I was only hurting my hand so I climbed back up the stairs reluctantly.

Turning down the hall I watched the smears tell a story. It was a story I didn’t know and one I had trouble piecing together. It looked like war had hit the facility, but it was all too quiet now. I headed towards the lobby.

The reception desk was battered and cracked but thankfully Sally wasn’t behind it. There was blood on her chair, but I had no way of knowing if it was hers or not, so I assumed not and glanced out the front doors. About thirty feet beyond the doors there was a wall. Thick solid looking metal glinted in the low sunlight. There had never been a wall beyond the grounds. I knew it, I was sure of it. Running to the doors, I grabbed one and shook it hard, trying to get it to open but it was firmly locked. I could see a gate, a closed gate, in the wall and started to outright panic.

Nothing was right and nothing was true. I pounded on the doors with my fists until they started to bleed, wet smears running along the glass that wasn’t just glass. I sank to my knees and smashed my forehead against the doors next, it wasn’t worth anything. My head was worthless, the lump of meat in it confused and bad and wrong. Hope had run out and when it had it left only despair behind for company. I cried, I wept and railed and got up. Backing up a few feet I started to throw myself against the doors as hard as possible. I needed to get out, I had to get out. It was all wrong, so perfectly and horribly wrong. Everything was wrong and I lived in a world of shit and evil. I had problems, that’s why I was sent here in the first place. Big problems, they said, but they only showed as little ones most of the time. Indicators, they called it, and put me away.

I felt clear now though, come full circle past madness to clarity and in clarity I was madder than before. The doors shook from the force of my body flying into them and my cries of powerlessness echoed around the lobby.

“John?” A dimly heard voice said, washed out by the thuds and rattles of my relentless attack on the doors. “John,” it repeated louder and with a strong sense of panic behind it. I stopped moving, bracing to be hurt. “John, hey, will you… will you stop?”

I spun and faced her, her voice breaking through where reason wouldn’t.

“Abby?” It was more than a word, it was a question full of every shred of hope I had left, the shreds that weren’t currently spreading slowly across the surface of the doors. She was bruised and bloodied, wearing a loose yellow sundress. She had a plastic bag in her hand, clutched tightly like it was her anchor in a rough sea. Just from her eyes I could tell she was as close to losing it as I was. “Oh fuck all, Abby, where were you? What happened, where is… what…” the words wouldn’t come out right, my brain and mouth both fighting for dominance.

“You don’t… you don’t remember do you,” she asked as we embraced. “I thought you were one of the ones who didn’t make it, but I,” she pulled away from me and offered me the bag, “I stole these for you from the exercise room, in case.” The bag had three small plastic stopwatches in it, the kind you hang around your neck while you jog. Each one was a different color and they all told the same time. “I thought maybe they would help you some, you know how you like clocks and I thought maybe…” she trailed off and just watched me as I put each one around my neck in turn.

“This is just the greatest, the best thing anyone has ever done for me.” The words spilled out of my mouth, their truth pure and simple.

“Well, I love you, what else was I supposed to do, schmuck,” her eyes settled and a bit of her old fire crept back in, “leave you lost and hopeless?” She loved me, she didn’t even have to say it, the act alone told me volumes, but she loved me and suddenly nothing else was wrong. I kissed her and held her gently and thought.

“Ok, this is going to sound crazy,” I began and stopped, both of us laughing and then started to cry, “but when I was, before I came here, I got electrocuted.” Her head tilted and I started to walk around the lobby looking for something, anything, that could help us. Clyde’s body was hidden behind a large floor pot and I walked up to it as I continued.

“I’m telling you, Abby, this place wasn’t anything like it is now when I first got here. No one but me seems to remember that though. And it only started changing when,” I bent down and picked up Clyde’s gun, “I got those treatments.”

“So you think that, what, each treatment changed everyone but you?” She followed me and grabbed Clyde’s metal-shod nightstick. I walked to the doors, standing a few feet behind them and held the gun.

“No, yes but no. I think maybe I changed where I was. Not, like, what room I was in, but what world I was in. It kept getting worse each time I went through it. They said I would lose some memory,”

I pulled the trigger and shot the door twelve times in generally the same area. The not-glass grew spider webs.

“But this wasn’t memory loss, I mean there was that too, but it’s like each time I got shocked I ended up in a different world entirely.” Abby walked up and started smashing at the door with the stick, the spider webs pushing outward as they fractured worse. “When we first met, that I remember, you screamed and hated me. This place was sunny and bright and happy, I liked it here. Now this. What happened?”

The door shattered and the pane of not-glass fell out with an unsatisfying noise. We stepped out into the daylight and fresh air.

“I think you’re crazy,” she said nervously, “but I suppose, for you it makes as much sense as anything else. It’s what do you call it, subjective reality?” I shrugged and nodded as we walked around the grounds. “As far as I remember though, this place has always been what it is. They brought me in, drugged, and my first night here when they dragged me into the dining room you came and snuck me some extra food. Anyway, your clocks went off and Fernsetter, what was…”

“Horatio,” I supplied as we started to walk around the building, looking for a way through or over the wall.

“Horatio. He lost it and started screaming about the noise from the alarm and attacked that guard, Simon, when they wouldn’t break down your door to shut the alarm off. Simon panicked a bit and fired a shot. He missed Horatio, who ran off, but he hit poor Ms. Klienstock. The other inmates,” inmates they called us now, it used to be residents, “got scared and a few of them tried to get the gun away from Simon. Doctor Lensher came out and started screaming and soon everyone was screaming and running and the guards tried to shut us all up. They started killing people and getting killed and everything just went wrong at once.” I nodded at her as we walked.

“So we’re all that’s left?”

“I think so? I don’t know, I hid in a supply closet until the noise died down and then went looking for you. I didn’t see anyone else moving though, so I guess…” A noise startled me and I raised the gun, not sure if I had any bullets left. I let go of Abby’s hand and lifted one of the stopwatches, the red one. It was early afternoon and I felt like lunch or possibly a smoke or both.

“Get back in the building, John, Abigail.” Warren shook his head and raised his own gun at me, his eyes growing wide as he talked once he saw I had a gun myself. “Put the fucking gun down now, John.” I fired, I don’t know if I meant to or if I just freaked a bit but a bullet took him in the leg and made him drop his gun in surprise and pain. I pulled the trigger again but it just clicked at me. I started to turn towards Abby but she was already rushing towards him, screaming.

“Don’t you ever try to shoot him,” she bellowed, bringing the nightstick down on his head and shoulders rapidly.

A sharp crack as the metal shod stick connected with his head. “You don’t try to kill him, or me,” a crunch underlined her point, “or the mice, or anyone ever again!” Wet things slid against hard things as her arm pistoned up and down in the direction of his skull. “You don’t raise guns at the President!” His head deflated as she caved it in, wet gray meat and blood running across the grass and seeping into the ground. Did she say President? I shook my head and moved to her side, hugging her from behind.

“Abby, Abby, it’s ok, he’s not going to hurt anyone.” Her body shook for a second in my grasp and then she calmed, turning her head to look at me over her shoulder.

“He was going to kill us, John. We have to, can we even get out of here?” I turned her in my arms to face me, running a hand down her arm. It was coated from the elbow down in blood and gore but I didn’t care. I wasn’t exactly pristine myself.

“We can get out of here. Look, Abby, I feel sharper, bigger inside, than I have in a long time. Moving around worlds, losing my mind, whatever else the process did to me it seems to have opened my head some. I don’t know if it’ll last but it’s here now, ok?” She nodded at me and we started to go on when she stopped.

“Wait,” she said and left me, running back towards Warren’s body. She came back to me quickly holding two small lumps in her hands, the bloody nightstick tucked under an arm. “He had grenades. Why would he have grenades? I don’t know either but he did. He did and now we have them.” I laughed then.

“Of course he had grenades.” He was looking for a way out, too, I think. And I think then I knew why he had them. I dropped the useless gun and took the grenades from her, walking up to the wall. I pulled the pins of both and ran, giving her a hurried follow-me wave. She followed and we were only thrown to the ground by the force of the dual explosions, but not hurt. I spat some grass out of my mouth and sat up, looking at the small jagged hole in the wall. I gave it a big hello smile, that I turned on the sky and then finally on Abby.

We stood up and ducked out of the hole, a piece of hot ragged metal tearing at my shoulder.

“Hey Abby,” I asked as we clasped hands and started walking down the road together, “what did you mean by ‘you don’t raise guns at the President’ anyway?” I looked at the red stopwatch. It was certainly a fine time for lunch and a smoke, and maybe a change of clothes. In the distance I could see fires and smoke, the craziness of the planet didn’t end at McGee’s, the whole world seemed aflame.

“Huh, oh that. Just a… it was uhh just a childhood thing, you know, when people would make fun of my name, huh?” She beamed a smile at me that faded fast as she pointed towards the horizon. “How are we gonna…”

“We’ll get by,” I told her, shrugging. I had some freedom, three new portable clocks and the love of my life with me. What was the end of the world compared to that? “Just a childhood thing huh?” I asked, glancing at her with a small grin.

“Yeah, stupid name.” I decided to trust her, for now. If she really was out to kill me, I would deal with that too, in time.

“Do you like golf?” I asked her as we walked.

“I always lose the stupid little balls. Fucking things drive me insane.”

“Really? I like the way they bounce and are white and round and all.” She shook her head at me and grinned a bit, punching me in the shoulder.

“You have issues, John.” I glanced back at McGee’s one last time and suddenly, just like Doctor West always said, I saw things in the right perspective.

“Don’t we all? I love you, Abby Lincoln.”

“I love you too, schmuck.”

———–
Crazy Little Thing is copyright Adam P. Knave.